METADATA, REPOSITORY AND METHODOLOGY IN LEARNING OBJECTS

Introduction:The competency-based learning requires an effort that depends not only on teaching strategies, but also to know how to select and apply appropriate resources for their achievement. On this basis, should be proposed resources aimed at developing skills, helping to adequate recovery and reuse of these resources (Morales et al., 2013).

Objective:The objective of this paper is to define the main elements associated to the learning objects, such as metadata, repository and different methodologies.

Metadata:Learning objects can be described with IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM), that is, a metadata standard for the description of educational resources. Different authors have enriched this proposal. Chikh 2014 includes two types of knowledge: reusable knowledge and knowledge of reuse. He define the LOM+ as an extension of LOM. Plodzien and Stemposz propose to extend the SCORM Educational category by introducing didactics, evaluation, functionality, usability. Sampson and Fytros 2008 propose a competence-based application profile of IEEE LOM standard, including purpose element and difficulty element. Vuorikari et al identify the need for a reusable and interoperable metadata model for sharing and reusing evaluations of learning resources. Ochoa and Duval propose the use of metadata to order the results of a search for educational materials and be able to recommend the most pertinent.

Repository:A learning object repository (LOR) is a kind of digital library which enables educators to store, manage and share digital resources for education in the form of learning objects (McGreal, 2007). These repositories maintain objects and metadata on a centralized server by storing them physically together, or maintain metadata only and provide links to objects distributed throughout the internet (Vargo et al., 2003). In this case, the metadata and LO’s are actually stored separately by presenting a combined repository to the outside world. There is a wide variety of e-learning repositories. Most are interactive and user-friendly web-based. Various well known LORs developed worldwide include:MERLOT (Schell and Burns, 2002) (www.merlot.org), MACE (Stefaner et al., 2007), AGORA (Prieto et al., 2008), ARIADNE (Ternier et al., 2009), LRE for Schools (lreforschools.eun.org), OER Commons (www.oercommons.org/), DLESE (www.dlese.org/), Ariadne, Maricopa, Careo.

Associate Methodologies:Different methodologies have been defined in the field of LO, take the case of Pons et al, 2015 the evaluation of quality for e-learning resources by defining a statistical method working on their metadata application of standards. Palavitsinis et al 2014 introduces and combines a number of quality methods and tools in the various phases of specifying the metadata schema to be used in populating the repository with metadata records that describe resources. Vargo et al. 2003 provided evidence that LORI can be used to reliably assess some aspects of learning objects and that using a collaborative assessment process can improve interrater reliability.

Acknowledgements:This research has been carried out under the project of innovation and educational improvement (PIME/2014/A21) 'OAICE: Learning Objects for the Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship Competence’ funded by the Universitat Politècnica de València and the School of Computer Science.